


Where I Lay My Hat

by Ilthit



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Bigamy, Established Relationship, F/M, Homelessness, Pies, York, mentions of Segundus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28943694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/pseuds/Ilthit
Summary: Mrs Pleasance has an unexpected, but not unwelcome, visitor.
Relationships: Hettie Pleasance/Vinculus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 6
Collections: JSAMN Valentine's Rarepair Fest!





	Where I Lay My Hat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palavapeite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palavapeite/gifts).



Some months after Mrs Pleasance had lost Mr Segundus as a lodger, his room still stood empty. The fact was that Mr Segundus had been such a pleasant sort of lodger that Mrs Pleasance did not really fancy taking another. What if the gentleman smoked? What if he did not pay in time, when money had already been spent in anticipation of his rent? God forbid, what if he did not appreciate Hettie’s table? Her cooking was something she most prided herself of, and Mr Segundus had never complained, had always had a kind word, and had eaten up very nearly everything she put in front of him. 

In the end, Mrs Pleasance decided not to advertise for another lodger. She was not getting any younger, true, but she had her savings. Should a suitable gentleman appear, she would not say no, but in the meanwhile, she would sell pies. 

Why pies, when her bread was so well known throughout the neighbourhood as the most excellent sort that anyone had ever tasted? Because pies, as she had been instructed by her friend, Mrs Cockcroft of the George Inn, were simple enough to make a great many of in a short time, made a hearty meal, and would always be popular; besides, one could put anything in a pie.

Not that Mrs Pleasance put just anything in her pies. There was always onion, always meat or fish or fowl, and she would never prevaricate about which had which. She received some unsold vegetables free from her cousin when he came to town for the market, and paid for the rest, spending her evenings preparing, pickling and drying what she could not use immediately. Her kitchen was the very model of organization, with jars and dry-boxes and even the prize of a single nutmeg safely stored away in her cupboard. Her pies were sold at the market, at the George, and occasionally even from her own door, since her friends and neighbours soon learned when a new batch would be ready to go out. 

It was a cloudy day, the sort that would make one put on one’s oilskin coat if one had business outdoors, even though the paving stones remained dry and dusty. Rain was written into the air, not quite a promise but a distinct possibility. Mrs Pleasance had set five of her pies to cool on the window-sill facing the snickleway that was Lady-Peckitt’s-yard while she chopped up onion for the next batch. She kept her eye upon the pies, for they smelled very good indeed, and little boys were always wont to steal one or two. (If they were very poor, she was wont to let them.) So it was that when she caught the shadow of someone hovering in the alley, she picked up her broomstick and approached the window, ready to trash the thief. And sure enough, a hand appeared and reached towards a steaming pie.

“Leave off, scoundrel,” she called. “You have been caught. Leave off, and I won’t have to spoil my broomstick on you.”

She expected to see a boy, perhaps the Cannings’ little rascal Cornelius, scramble away down the alley, but instead a dirty, grinning head popped up over the windowsill. “Hettie, dearest, is that any way to greet your husband?”

“Vinculus!” Hettie exclaimed, and hit him with her broom, upsetting a pie.

Love being love, however, it was not long until the thief had become a guest, and Vinculus had the honour of finishing not only one but three pies while Mrs Pleasance tidied up the kitchen and put away the rest of her food under lock and key. Three pies was one thing, allowing a ravenous husband free rein of one’s cupboards quite another. While she tidied, she talked, and he listened—indeed, Vinculus’s ability to listen while he ate had been one of his best points as a husband. She told him of the pie-selling business, of the little boys, of her sister’s youngest son’s marriage, of the excellent lodger she had lost, and by that route naturally also of the disbanding of the York Society of magicians (though Mrs Pleasance was aware that Vinculus was a very different magician from those learned gentlemen, she nonetheless assumed he would be interested in their doings), and what she thought of Mr Norrell, despite all his recently gained greatness. Once she had done talking, and he was done eating, she huffed, regarded him with some discontent, and asked, “Will you be wanting a bath, then?” 

“Only if you join me in it, Hettie.” 

She threw a tea-towel at him. “You will have a bath, sir, if you intend to sleep in my nice clean linen.” 

And so she got out the copper bath and set it up in front of the fire in the sitting room and set the pot to boil. The skies still withheld the rain, so she hollered out of the kitchen window for the neighbour’s boy to take her pies to the George for a penny, and when he was gone, she closed her shutters and locked her door. Sin or no sin, she would rather be known in these parts as Mrs Pleasance than Mrs Vinculus. 

Vinculus stood scratching his belly and staring up at the ceiling of the sitting room when she returned with a bucket and a scrub-brush. “Magician, was he?” he muttered, and it took a moment for Hettie to realize he meant Mr Segundus, her former lodger, whose room had been situated directly above the sitting room on the third storey. “I believe I know the man. He is on my skin. I have met him already and given him my message.” Vinculus often said odd things like this; Hettie did not pay it much mind. Magicians’ business was their own. 

“Now, get out of those rags, villain, and let me see if I can break this brush on your skin.” 

“You are cruelty itself, my love,” said Vinculus, but he grinned as he stripped, the blue writing on his skin seeming to glow in response to the flames nearby. 

The water ran grey, and Hettie replenished it several times before she was satisfied. Vinculus was red where he wasn’t blue, but he was clean, and though no skill of Hettie’s could untangle his long, matted hair, she had squeezed sand and Heaven-knows-what out of it until it no longer felt crusty under her hand. He submitted to her treatment like a lazy cat to petting. Her arms were wet and soapy up to the elbow, where she had rolled up her sleeves, and she dipped her hands into the cooling water, down along that narrow, bony chest, and the skin that made her fingers tingle. 

Hettie had always been a good Christian woman. She had never known a man apart from her two husbands. Bigamy was a sin, of course, but Hettie had landed in it through a circumlocutious route which in her mind absolved her from any guilt. By the time she married Mr Pleasance, she had long since lost sight of Vinculus, and had every reason to think him dead or gone to America, and one could not fault a woman for remarrying if her husband was dead or in America. By the time she learned that Vinculus was neither, Mr Pleasance was himself dead, and there did not seem to be any reason to bother the priests or the courts about the matter. After all, she had only ever had one husband that she knew of at a time, and that had not changed. (Of Vinculus’s other wives, she knew nothing, but would not have been surprised to learn.) 

It ought not be said, but it was a fact also that while Mr Pleasance had been a good husband, and Vinculus a neglectful one, it was the latter she had married for love—for love, and also for the sake of propriety, as she had been discovered giving him baths as a maid of nineteen, while visiting her cousins in London. There had been a perfectly good and rather long explanation, but as it was rather improper, everyone had thought it best they marry. Hettie had not minded; it was rather something to be married, and to a man who gave prophecies, no less. A man who saw the future, young Hettie had surmised, would know how to make something of himself. While Vinculus had disappointed her in that regard, he had not done so in other ways, until the day she had been summoned back to York to her father’s side, and the two had lost sight of one another. 

“Look at you.” He had always been rangy, but age had made his skin thinner, and his ribs seemed to poke out of his chest while his belly swelled with the tell-tale bloating of alcohol and poor nutrition. “I would have fed you all your days if you’d wished it, you scoundrel.” 

“Oh, yes,” he said, “and tried kept me from drink and the devil too, I imagine. You’re a good woman, Hettie.” 

She clucked her tongue and rubbed the knots out of the muscles if his neck. Even now, she wanted nothing more than to cushion him in comfort. She had been alone for too long. What was a woman of her heart and mind to do without someone to pamper and care for? But he would have his own way, and be gone in the morning, sleeping with lice and brambles the following night, likely as not, and there wasn't a blessed thing she could do about it. She had accepted that a long time ago. 

He leaned back into her arms and lifted his bearded face for her to kiss, and she forgave him. A peck turned into a caress, and they stayed that way for a while as the fire crackled towards its death. Then he tugged at her as if to pull her into the water. She shrieked, he laughed, and soon, after a series of rebukes and exclamations, so did she. 

The rain began to patter down at last. It came down in heavy drops, thickening to an all-out onslaught that filled up gutters and topped up the River Ouse until it brimmed. It would be a nasty night for anyone caught sleeping in the streets. Vinculus spent it in clean linen, with his belly full, and against his back the warm, pliant contours of a softly snoring woman. 


End file.
